Fiction: Legal Theft Project–From the Skies (251 words)

30Sep

Lea’s little sister had spent nine tenths of her life with her head tilted back, sedately keeping a watch on the stars. When they were little, it was all because of the comforting line that their father had used to describe their dead mother. He’d told Lea and Marie that their mother was in the stars now, watching them from above to make sure that they stayed safe. So Marie tilted her head back and smiled wide and tried to promise her mother that they were safe, all while looking for any hint of their mother smiling down on her.

Of course, there wasn’t one, because that wasn’t the way that the world actually worked. Their mother was dead and not smiling down on anyone. There would be no sign of her among the stars. But Marie did notice other things while she smiled up at the stars. She watched patterns and constellations and meteor storms and the whole universe changing overhead. And the more that she watched and saw, the more she wanted to learn and understand why. So, during her daylight hours she locked herself away in planetariums, libraries, university lecture halls, anywhere someone might be able to tell her what was happening out there, or even better any place that would give her the tools to figure it out for herself.

So Lea’s little sister spent so much of her life looking up at the stars. Why should it surprise anyone that she found something spectacular up there?